I Go Fishing

He told nobody. Not out of shame exactly, and not out of secrecy. There was simply nobody it would not have required a conversation with.

Nights. Six on, three off, in a building on an industrial estate with a car park that floods, doing something he did for four years before any of the rest of it and could do with his eyes shut.

It is honest work. He wants that said. Nobody in that building is doing anything he would be embarrassed by.

What came apart is not going to be described here in detail, because it involved people who are still alive. It ran for nine years and it was, in the language people use, a work of God. There were things in it he still cannot account for. And it ended over eighteen months in a way that was partly other people and partly a set of circumstances and partly, if he is honest at three in the morning, him.

He has not prayed properly in about five months. He has said things. He has not prayed.

And the sentence that goes with him into that building every night is not I have given up. It is: I went back to the plain thing, which is what a man does when the other thing has finished with him.

You know that shift. It might be a job, or a routine, or an ordinary life you had set aside for something and have now returned to. And the return has felt less like a decision and more like a verdict being carried out.

Where the story puts Him

There is a chapter after the resurrection where seven men are standing about, and one of them says the plainest sentence in the gospels.

Simon Peter saith unto them, I go a fishing. They say unto him, We also go with thee. They went forth, and entered into a ship immediately; and that night they caught nothing.John 21:3

Read what is not in that verse. There is no rebuke. Nobody in the text calls it a retreat, or backsliding, or a failure of nerve. Preachers have supplied all of that for two thousand years and none of it is on the page.

What is on the page is a man who had denied Jesus in a courtyard a few weeks earlier going back to the thing he knew how to do, at night, with six others who did not argue with him.

And here is where the chapter puts Jesus: on the shore. In the morning. Already there, with a fire already going and fish already on it, before any of them knew who He was.

He did not meet them at a meeting. He met them at their ordinary work, at dawn, with breakfast.

You are somebody Christ meets at ordinary work, and He has never once required a man to be back in the right role first. That is what the written word says over you and not a soft framing chosen for a man on a night shift, and the Holy Spirit who is with you in that building at three in the morning is the evidence that nothing has finished with you.

Watch what that does to the arithmetic on the drive in. If He is on the shore at dawn, then six nights on and three off is information about a rota. It is not a retreat from anything, and it never had the standing to become that.

What this page is not going to do

Here is the second thing, and it is where every other version of this goes wrong.

There is a well known sermon that takes this passage and tells the man on the night shift that he has gone back to the boat and needs to get out of it. Nothing here says that. It is not in the text and it has done a great deal of damage to people who were, at the time, simply exhausted.

So: nothing here is telling you to leave that job, or to go back to anything, or to try again with what came apart. Nothing in the written word puts a man out of it for that, and His Spirit is not standing at a rota waiting either. If you work nights on that estate until you retire, you have not stepped one inch outside anything God is doing.

And nothing here promises a restoration. The chapter does contain one, and it is specific and it is Peter's, and it happens after breakfast rather than as a condition of it. Nobody on this page can tell you what yours looks like or whether it comes.

You have been carried through the whole eighteen months and through five months of not praying properly, and the carrying did not stop when the praying did. Scripture says He works all things after the counsel of His own will, and it is the Holy Spirit at work in you in a car park that floods rather than waiting for you to get back into position.

This is where your mouth comes into it, because I am not leaving you with a warm thought and a night shift. Jesus taught that the smallest living faith a man has, spoken out loud at the thing in the way, is enough for God to work with. Spoken, and it does not have to be prayer, and after five months it probably will not sound like it. And the thing in the way is not the people and it is not the eighteen months. It is a sentence: this is what a man does when the other thing has finished with him. Nobody has ever answered that out loud, and you least of all.

You have real authority to answer it, and it is yours because you are in Christ, not because you feel like a man with any authority clocking in at ten at night. Scripture hands you the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words, and the power was never in the nine years.

If this has taken you somewhere darker than exhaustion, and there are nights when you would rather not be here at all, tell a living person today. Your doctor, or a crisis line, 988 in the United States, 116 123 in the United Kingdom, or the emergency number where you live. That is not a detour from what God is doing with your life. Very often it is exactly what He is doing, arriving down a telephone.